If you don't know, Phantom of the Opera, at least the version I’m talking about, is a musical (closer to a light opera by definition) about a mad genius living in and terrorizing the staff of an opera house by pretending to be a ghost (the eponymous Phantom), a chorus girl, Christine, whom he's obsessed with, and said chorus girl's boyfriend, Raoul, who comes to shake up the Phantom's fear-enforced status quo. I’m not lucky enough to have gone to a stage production of it, so forgive me if my lack of knowledge of the movie adaptation’s liberties starts to show, but I believe it’s a pretty faithful one.

So, how does something that fits into a category as sophisticated-sounding as light opera, something based on a novel from 1910, end up topping the guilty pleasures list? Well...

Why it's guilty:

Oh god, this love triangle. This plot.

*Deep breaths*

Okay, basically, the Phantom's been courting Christine by pretending to be an angel sent by her dead father. Creepy, but it's supposed to be. So far so good. Then Raoul and Christine bump into each other, renewing their childhood friendship and sending it hurtling toward something more. Fine.

The Phantom gets mad, and Christine gets conflicted.

And that's pretty much the sum of Christine's plotline from then on. She's conflicted. She's conflicted when the Phantom kidnaps her to his subterranean lair, plays music for her, yells at her that she'll never escape, and then changes his mind and kicks her out. She's conflicted when he starts sabotaging rival performers and killing stage hands to impress her.She’s clearly conflicted when he tries to kidnap her again, attacking Raoul when he intervenes, because she stops Raoul from killing the Phantom in the ensuing swordfight, exclaiming,

"Not like this!"

…And then, immediately afterward, agrees to act as bait in Raoul's plan to lure the Phantom to his death at the next performance, for the greater good.

Because tricking the Phantom into getting unmasked and gunned down in front of an unsuspecting paying audience is so much more honorable, tasteful and dignified than letting him lose the nice, private, relatively fair duel that the Phantom initiated.

And what exactly is Raoul's brilliant plan that Christine's so okay with?

Put Christine onstage so the Phantom will be sure to show up, and have guys with guns ready for when he's spotted. That's all.

This plan officially makes Raoul the smartest person in this particular universe other than the Phantom himself, because apparently no one else has ever thought of it before. True, it naturally leads to the Phantom using Christine as a human shield and whisking her back to his lair as counter-bait for a final showdown,

But hey, someone had to try it.

Oh, did I mention that the lyrics through all of this have a habit of rhyming the same word with itself? Because they do. And that constant warning to keep your hand at the level of your eyes? If you’re wondering what they’re talking about, it's based on an old French stage convention, but it's tragically wasted by not also being a warning about an eye-gouging booby-trap in the Phantom’s lair!

Why it's a pleasure:

Okay, I can do a little analysis of exactly how this tickles the girliest of the primal lizard parts of my brain.

…Yeah, sorry.

In spite of how far from a good character Christine is in every way, there's something relatable about the unfairness of her position, constantly being used in and blamed for the violence of the male characters she cares about, just because she refuses to validate it in the right ways at the right moments, and some unshakeable appeal in the theme of those attractive but violent male characters having to come to the conclusion that love can’t be won by force. But there are also much simpler reasons to enjoy Phantom.

This is one of those mood pieces that takes you instantly away to someplace magical, in spite of the frustrating slightness of the plot there, or the fact that the magic isn't real even within that plot. This has close to everything to do with the music. It just takes a few bars of the overture, and you're in a haunted old timey opera house, and something big is about to go down.

Okay, it's not Mozart, there are some annoying lyrical tics, and there are only a few melodies that get repeated throughout, but this score tells a story better than the story itself does. Every song carries exactly the feeling it's intended to, in such potent concentration that it hardly matters how clumsy the setups are.

The often repeating melodies have been called lazy, but I actually find them more powerful that the more common hit-or-miss variety of so many musical soundtracks.

Phantom's figured out exactly what works, for comedy, despair, drama, thoughtfulness, etc., and it goes straight for the note it wants.

There's a line sung by the opera house administrators that makes me think this is all entirely conscious: "You'd never get away / with all this in a play / but if it's loudly sung / and in a foreign tongue / it's just the sort of story audiences adore / in fact, a perfect opera."

Minus the foreign tongue, that's exactly the phenomenon at work in Phantom itself. The intensity of the moments of musical feeling overshadowing the flimsy melodrama behind them.Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Wait, this one needs some additional disclaimers. I'm a huge defender of YA dark sci-fi and dystopia. I love them for being an influential, largely female-led fictional subgenre that doesn't revolve entirely around romance. I love them for being action-packed adventures and for often having well-executed, heavy, emotional character storylines. I'm a proud fan of The Hunger Games (in spite of its notable worldbuilding flaws and the multitude of pointless new characters in book three), and Delirium and Uglies may be my two favorite book series yet to be brought to every non-reader's lips through the magic of screen.

...And then there's Divergent.

Why it's guilty:In this specific, narrow subgenre where everything is accused of being derivative, poorly contrived, or both, the Divergent series is one of the most derivative and poorly contrived of the well-known examples.

(You can check out my full reviews of the Divergentand Insurgentbooks and the Divergent movie, should you so desire).If you don't know, this particular dystopia revolves around people being divided into five factions according to their most dominant personality traits.

The factions determine their jobs and basically every aspect of their lives, and the evil government wants to hunt down and kill anyone found to be "Divergent," meaning they have multiple dominant traits, because such people threaten the current balance of power. Tris, our hero, is one of these Divergents in hiding.

So, basically, it's a somewhat less hardcore and more convoluted Panem from The Hunger Games, with a Sorting Hat.

“Gryffin- I mean, Dauntless!”

Then there’s how particularly forced the standard chosen one scenario and the personal relationship between hero and dictator-villain are in the Divergent series.

Tris starts foiling evil plans and making herself a special favorite nuisance to the bad guys long before it's revealed what an ultra-Divergent she is, and in ways that aren't caused by her ultra-Divergence among Divergents, which isn't even particularly special if you really think about her secret heritage backstory. Yet it manages to force later plotlines to revolve around her through increasingly conspicuous coincidences.

"Only YOU can open the box, because..." Okay, this plotline is simplified from the book version, but still.

Now, if you’re thinking, “I’d be difficult to sort, what’s so unusual about that?” or, “What’s so dangerous about some confused kids who have no idea what’s going on and no particular urge to overthrow anything until you started trying to exterminate them?” well, the good news is that these questions will eventually be answered pretty well.The bad news is that once the nonsensical fake-out principles of this dystopia, which we were supposed to accept as the real ones for the whole first book, start getting picked apart and explained in the later books, it's like trying to watch a political thriller serial starting in the middle, with all the subgroups suddenly vying for power.

Then there are the more general problems. Characters are largely defined by faction, with side attributes more told than shown and side plots that are unsatisfyingly resolved, the story is cluttered, the accept-yourself message gets corny especially in the movie version, and the romance with the mysterious and brooding instructor, Four, borders on sleazy.

And yet...

Why it's a pleasure:There are a few noteworthy redeeming qualities I could go into here. There's the way the series actually sort of turns the trope of the ordinary protagonist being the most special person in the world on its head, by revealing that Tris's specialness is that she is a normal, whole person, and it's the rest of her world that's messed up.

Then there are the great performances in the movieverse, and the surprisingly merciless stakes of the bookverse (characters do die, unexpectedly, sometimes important ones, sometimes senselessly).

But it really it comes down to two things for me. First, I have a soft spot for surreal adventures through the psyche, which is one of the Divergent series’ recurring devices. They're not the deepest of surrealist sequences, but they're decent, plentiful, and not dull.

Second, Divergent and even Insurgent, the installments before the political intrigue really flies off the rails, are pretty tightly turning thrillers on both page and screen, with a likeable enough hero to make those turns felt.

And if I can get an evening's fun out of fast-paced, semi-nonsensical action when it follows an ordinary male hero, motivated and maybe occasionally assisted by female eye candy, as long as there are enough entertaining elements mixed in and my brain is on half power, then...

Oh yes, I can sure as hell enjoy this.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

The Basics:
Kayla returns home from a forced summer vacation, wanting nothing more than to pick up her life where she left it. She's supposed to have been recovering from the car accident culmination of an end-of-school party gone awry, but her small town hasn't recovered in her absence. It seems her home will turn against her whether or not she tells what she knows, about the accident, the death, or the rape she was unlucky enough to witness moments before.Oh, that's a huge spoiler, by the way. And it's on the back cover. More on that in a minute.

The Downside:
For the first third of the book, nothing happens. That is, Kayla comes home in the present timeline to find herself frozen out by her beloved town and friends, and in the interspersed pre-party timeline, we get to see her seemingly perfect life and friendships as they were before. That, and the slow hints at what happened to change the one timeline into the other, are all that fill the whole first act of the book. This might be fine, if there were any of the apparently intended suspense to those hints, but as mentioned above, anyone who reads the blurb before the book, as most of us do, already knows the gist of the mysterious tragedy going in, and with that jumping off point, most of the details fall into place fairly clearly within a few chapters. It's not wondering what happened that tempts turning the page; it's waiting for it to be dealt with. And that's a long wait.Since the door's open to the real subject matter, though, I’ll say that Kayla's internal musings on sexual double-standards and violence are a little clinical and by-the-numbers. Apt, intelligent, and deeply important, yes, but it would have been nice to see them expressed in a more freshly personal, character-based way, as opposed to in the same words that might be used in many a sexual harassment seminar.The Upside:
Refer back to the apt, intelligent, and deeply important part. On-the-nose as its direct analyses can be, Every Last Promise has its heart firmly in the right place when it comes to the issues of the shaming, devaluing and discrediting of girls, both directly related to the rape plotline and in the constant, seemingly minor other ways (seriously, who wants to be caught caring about something called a Powderpuff game?). These are things that can't be said enough, even if in the same words.Kayla's love for her home and her dread of the inevitable change at the end of high school is also well played. The countdown to adulthood is a mix of anticipation of new beginnings fear of endings, and since heroes tend to be of the more driven and ambitious type, the latter element is less often expired, and it's well captured here. The style of the writing itself is moody and immersive and occasionally startlingly poetic. All around a sad, solid, if somewhat slow read.Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Welcome back to my countdown of those works of art that I can’t call good, yet can’t help enjoying in at least mostly intentional ways!(Click the links to read Favorite Guilty Pleasure #4 and #5)

Snakes on a Plane is a movie about exactly what the title implies. There's a plane. It's full of snakes. Disaster and plucky improvisation ensue.

Why it's guilty:

This part probably goes without saying. It's called Snakes on a Plane. In fact, most of the support for this movie, both behind the scenes and from audiences when it was first released, revolved around how openly silly and to-the-point the working title turned final title is, and the movie itself delivers what it promises.

It’s about a commercial airliner that's been filled with snakes for the purpose of killing one guy before he can testify against the mob in the most ridiculously elaborate hit since the twist of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.

Sorry, HP, you know I love you!

It's an excuse for people in an enclosed space to freak out, argue, battle and be killed by various kinds of snakes, and then land a plane through the magic of videogames. There's even a death scene for the flight attendant who was a day from retirement (give or take). Also, Samuel L. Jackson plays a role that’s basically a fanfic to an amalgam of his previous roles.

Why it's a pleasure:

Okay, there's some sentiment going on here, because Snakes on a Plane, of all things, was Matt's and my very first date movie.

There's also plenty of the sleazy joy of B monster movies to be found in Snakes on a Plane. There are lots of cheers and winces to be had from the snakes' assault on characters of varying likeability. But the reason Snakes on a Plane makes my favorites list instead of an actual generic B movie is the way it somehow consistently fails to be quite as bad as it should be.Oh, it's not a good movie by any means, that point must be stressed, but all those objections you're coming up with to the whole premise? It actually addresses them about as well as possible, under the circumstances.

Aren't most snakes fairly sedentary and docile creatures that will only attack larger animals if provoked? Yes, that's why the bad guys had to spray the leis all the passengers were given with pheromones to make the snakes aggressive enough for 106 minutes of snake attack mayhem.

Where the hell would someone get access to this many different species of venomous snakes and giant constrictors? That's what the cops are trying to figure out, in their subplot investigating the exotic animal black market. Aren't the people who get bitten and miraculously make it to solid ground probably screwed anyway, being full of venom from a non-native species the local hospital would have no reason to have antivenin on hand for? Well, that's why our heroes have been in contact with those local hospitals since the first inkling of the disaster, making sure they're bringing in as much of as many kinds of antivenins as possible from zoos, research facilities, and anywhere else that might have them.

Wow, someone actually kinda thought this through. There isn’t the laugh-out-loud bargain basement CG you’d find in direct-to-Syfy-Channel monster movies either. In fact, a lot of the snakes you see are actual snakes.

And the human performances were never going to win any awards, but again, no laugh-out-loud, fifth grade school play line deliveries. Everyone gives their all and comes off as human enough that some of the death scenes are genuinely sad.

So if you're in for some gratuitous creature-related body count fun that doesn't totally insult your intelligence, this one's my pick.Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Once again, I'm devoting the month of August to a countdown of those works of fiction I can't call good, but that I also can't help enjoying in at least mostly the intended way.

Lois and Clark is a nineties live action TV adaptation of Superman. If you haven't seen it, well, you already know how it goes. Guy from a sweet adoptive family from Kansas is secretly a super powered alien, determined to use his differences for good. He moves to the big city to make it as a reporter, falls in love with fellow journalist Lois Lane,

and struggles to balance the life he wants to live with a harsh schedule of covertly rescuing kittens from trees and humanity from annihilation. There's kryptonite, universe-warping interdimensional beings, improbable glasses and hair-combing related disguises, the whole bit.

Why it's guilty: This show is basically the lovechild of ‘80s comics of the wackier variety and nineties romantic sitcoms, so there's plenty of guilt to go around. You've got heavy-handed social justice messages bafflingly paired with embarrassing stereotypes, plotlines revolving around frog-eating clones, concussion-induced amnesia, even an episode ripped directly from another entry to come higher on this list, and enough excuses to prolong Clark and Lois's courtship to obliterate several relationships of saner people. In fact, it feels about par for course by that time in season four when Lois is finally about to deflower Clark, after their wedding, which occurred in an episode fittingly titled “Swear To God, This Time We're Not Kidding,” and H.G Wells shows up to tell them to knock it off before they doom the world to evil and darkness.

Really.

There are none of the complex, weighty storylines of moral ambiguity here that can be found in the animated series.

Wait the Saturday morning cartoon has substance, and the adult live action show is on the guilty pleasures list? Yes. I stand by that.

Also, best Lois Lane ever? Best Lois lane ever.

Why it's a pleasure:

The plotlines may border on silver age levels of crazy, especially after the first season, but never silver age callousness. The good guys and their relationships have an unfailing sweetness to them. Clark turns to his parents for support and advice on everything from love to the responsibilities of superheroics to how to get bomb stains out of his clothes, and they're every bit the good-hearted people who could have raised Superman.

Much of Lois Lane’s silver age ditziness is sadly intact here, but Teri Hatcher takes this airheaded, flighty, chocoholic version of Lois and absolutely chews the scenery with her, pushing her so far over the top that she swings all the way around to lovable. Even Perry White is likeable as an invested mentor to the pair of reporters, and the chemistry between Lois and Clark is strong enough to keep you from saying to hell with them at some point between the mistaken identity shenanigans and a detour to Sherwood Forest.Most especially, the way both Dean Cain and the writers play Superman himself is, hands down, the most sympathetic interpretation I know. He's the big blue Boy Scout in the best sense of the phrase. He's naive and optimistic and idealistic, without being overly judgmental or condescending. He's the guy who wants to do the right thing just because it's the right thing. He's the guy who dreams of falling in love and having an affectionate, supportive family like the one he comes from.

“Nice outfit!”“Thank you. My mom made it for me.”

He's the guy who believes in truth and justice and refuses to outgrow it, someone who doesn’t instantly make angsty peace with the concept of doing bad things for good reasons. And it doesn’t make him a bland, abstract ideal to the point of not being a character, either. He's a guy, with the power to stop bad guys and help people, and for the most part, people love him for it. And as any superhero geek can understand, he gets a kick out of this. It has its bad days, there are people he can't help and sacrifices he makes in his personal life, but he loves helping people and doing right, and he goofs off and has fun along the way where he can.

He's got his vulnerabilities and insecurities too. He's romantically inexperienced and has never been sick or hurt before he encounters kryptonite, so over the course of the series, we see him take multiple brand new shocks to the system, but he never lets it make him insensitive to other people, because he’s spent his whole life loving people who are more fragile than he is, and that's shaped his priorities.

Could it be that I'm feeling a little extra nostalgic lately for an adaptation where fakeout wedding episodes were the price to be paid for a Superman who could actually be liked before he's tested?

Maybe just a lil'

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

About Storm Moon

A betrayal. An invasion. A plan centuries old.Two members of the Covenant are dead, the Bond broken. Archard is also dead, but only because Simon used the forbidden control of his healing powers. Willa wakes the next morning beside him. But it’s not Simon – not her soul mate and husband – it’s Bartholomew the Dark. And she has no idea.Sarah Fairfield, Willa’s mother, watches Willa and Simon leave for a honeymoon in Europe. She feels something is wrong; the crows circle the house. But she tells herself she stopped believing in those signs a long time ago – the day she turned away from magic. The day her mother, Tara Algood, died in search of a girl Grandma Mabel dreamed about until it killed her.How can Willa fight an enemy hidden behind Simon’s eyes? How can she discover the evil that squats inside him when Bartholomew has the ability to control her mind? How can she save Simon and herself before Bartholomew destroys everything?

About Teri Harman

Teri Harman has believed in all things wondrous and haunting since her childhood days of sitting in the highest tree branches reading Roald Dahl and running in the rain imagining stories of danger and romance. Currently, her bookshelf is overflowing, her laundry unfolded, and her three small children running mad while she pens bewitching novels. She also writes a bi-weekly book column for ksl.com, Utah's #1 news site and hosts a monthly television segment for Studio 5, Utah's #1 lifestyle show. Teri Harman lives in Saratoga Springs, Utah.

As a genre geek, I'm used to many of the stories I love being dismissed as popcorn by non-geeks on principle alone. I'll rail to no end against this kind of sight-unseen generalization, and I love exploring and discussing the depth and substance to be found in many a genre story.

But not this month.

I also have a penchant for works of the "so bad it's good" variety. I love a good laugh at wild incompetence and unintentional camp.

This list isn't for those pleasures either.

No, when I say guilty pleasure, I'm talking about those works of fiction that I can't with a straight face call unfairly maligned or good, but that I also can't help enjoying in at least a mostly intentional, non-mockery based way.

First up, the reigning champion of the cheap jump scare, the Paranormal Activity series.

If you've never seen it, here's how it goes:

A certain family, revolving in the present-day timeline around two adult sisters, Katie and Kristi, has long been stalked by demons. The series follows various branches of the family across two generations as they for various reasons taunt and provoke the demons and video record the creepy stuff that happens in their houses.

Why it's guilty:

After the first movie uses up the excuse that Katie's boyfriend is kind of a dick, the excuses for the cameras and demon-poking become increasingly flimsy. The backstory, when it inevitably tries to explain how the whole demon stalking thing got started with the activities of a dark coven, there's nothing particularly interesting or different about it.

If you’ve seen one horror movie coven, you’ve seen them all. Or at least you’ve seen this one.

There's no stunning character development, social commentary, or psychological insight here. Basically everything in these movies is there to set up the weird stuff happening in a house scares.

Why it's a pleasure: Apart from the lackluster backstory, this is a series that knows where its strengths are, and it runs with them in more imaginative and effective ways than you'd think would be possible with its very simple premise and low-budget approach. It's not deep and thought-provoking, but it is scary. It starts simple, with slamming doors and sleepwalking and ill-advised Ouija Board use, but it continues to bring in new gags,

Wii motion sensors. Haven't seen demons play with those yet.

And more importantly, it keeps a powerful enough atmosphere of growing tension to make them most of them when it does. One of the biggest events of the first movie is Katie getting dragged out of bed by an invisible force, and after all the hands-off creepy leading up to it, it's a gasp-worthy moment.

It helps that, while the characters aren't the most complex and explored, the performances are pretty solidly believable all around. In part three, the one lovable guy to be found in the series (the other male characters have a pretty damning track record of demon-taunting and willful denial) and Katie's childhood self manage to make a scene of playing Bloody Mary in the bathroom mirror genuinely terrifying with their freakouts.

Most of all, though, Paranormal Activity is impressive in the way good haunted mazes are impressive. The way Disneyland is impressive. It know its non-storytelling-related forms of manipulation, like controlling sightlines.For this example, I must only point to the infamous Fan Cam.In part three, the tormented family, in their efforts to see what’s really happening through the power of video surveillance, attach a camera to the oscillating base of a fan, and what ensues is jump scare magic.The choreography of the scenes in front of the moving camera keeps you always wanting to see exactly what you can't at any given moment. Or not wanting to see it, yet wanting to see it, because this is a movie about stalking demons.

Okay, so this isn't the series you want to write your thesis on, but if you need some good horror tension and release, Paranormal Activity has it down.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Movie Review:Paper TownsJuly, 2015B(Note: Like most of my movie reviews, this one is for readers of the source material and analyzes the movie as an adaptation, not a standalone work. ﻿﻿﻿You can read my review of the book, Paper Towns, here﻿﻿﻿.)The Basics:As in the book, Quentin is a tad obsessed with the legend of Margo Roth Spiegelman, the it girl who can do anything. When she goes missing, he embarks on a quest to both find and understand her.The Downside:Both book and movie hover around the admirable idea of debunking the legend of Margo Roth Spiegelman and humanizing the unhappy girl behind it, but both fall a little short of realizing it. The movie in particular leaves Margo, I think completely unintentionally, very close to the glamorous mythical cypher she was to begin with.The movie plot is also pretty brutally streamlined, sometimes harmlessly (skipping the search of the unfinished subdivisions and the poetry explication, fine), sometimes less so. Quentin’s whole period of believing Margo’s killed herself and is leading him to her body, a reasonable guess after everything she said and did on her last night at home, is missing, lowering the stakes and making Quentin come off even more naïve than in the book.And as a superficial distraction, no doubt due to some odd last minute editing, Margo appears to live both next door to and across the street from Quentin at different intervals.The Upside: As you'd hope for in any good adaptation, the cast brings a lot of life to the characters. While some forced banter takes the place of the book's forced metaphors, the chemistry between Quentin and his friends is a charming, nostalgia-inducing highlight. Angela gets to come along on the final adventure in the movie version, making her more a character and less the vague concept she was in the book, and adding some much-needed consistency to Radar's arc, which involves learning to trust her enough to invite her into the weird and embarrassing parts of his life. Quentin's progression is also brought to a bit more of a point in the end. As well as (almost) coming to understand that Margo is just a person, and not the one he’s really looking for, he gets to absorb some of the best of her along the way. Ending things at prom instead of graduation is a great choice here amid the aforementioned streamlining, the breaking down of his disinterest in prom becoming a moment of growth.If you enjoyed the book, check out the movie, and go ahead and bring along your friends who thought the trailer made it look like a feel-good, embrace life adventure, because it is.Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!